Month: October 2016

I’m really happy to have an essay in the current issue of The Southeast Review (Vol. 34.2), among the work of many fine poets, artists, and writers of fiction and nonfiction. The Southeast Review is a literary journal run by the graduate students and a faculty advisor in the English Department at Florida State University. My essay, “The Gun Show,” tells about my first trip to a gun show in King of Prussia, PA back in 2003, against the backdrop of a shooting accident from my childhood, in which my dad, a gunsmith, unintentionally shot our neighbor, who subsequently died. This is part of a larger project – a full-length memoir – about my relationship with my dad, the guns always there. Always.

This journal only puts a few selected pieces online after the next issue comes out, so the only way you would be able to read this essay for the foreseeable future would be to buy the journal here. Thanks for your continued support as I work to get this story out :-).

This series, which has been running for 30 years, features roughly 25 essays that are reprinted in full from the publications in which they appeared in the prior year. Then, in the back of the volume are a few hundred “Notables,” which are listed alphabetically by author name, title, and the journal in which they appeared. That’s where I am, and happy and proud to be there! I’m in good company. Others in the back of the book include Claudia Rankine, Lia Purpura, Dinty Moore, Marilyn Robinson, Chris Offutt, and Phillip Lopate, one of my mentors at Bennington, as well as many other amazing writers and thinkers. As a writer who has not published a literary book yet, every bit of validation, whether through acceptance by a publication or an unexpected honor like this, gives me the courage to press on, exploring themes and issues that bubble up, struggling to get my thoughts down just right, then putting them out into the world, and bracing for the rejections that inevitably follow before, perhaps, an acceptance. Thanks to Literal Latte for giving “Detours” a home in New York City’s literary landscape and to Robert Atwan for its inclusion as a “Notable.”